For several years, consideration has been given to the problems related to the increase in air traffic and notably the large workload that this implies for aircraft crews. In concrete terms, the quantity of information to be taken into account and the number of tasks to be carried out by the crew is increasing whereas there is a tendency for the number of crew members to reduce.
Certain aircraft navigation aid systems make it possible to manage navigation instructions, coming from an air controller or from an airline company. The navigation instructions are tasks that the crew or the pilot must carry out. The management of these instructions is carried out by the intermediary of communication routers and their graphic interfaces. The instructions which have an impact on the running of the mission, for example on the flight plan, can be inserted in a semi-automatic or fully automatic manner in computers responsible for the management of the flight. However, the integration of these automatic procedures in the computers is costly and remains rather limited. Certain navigation instructions transmitted to the crew in the form of voice or numerical messages are taken into account in an entirely manual way. The same applies to the navigation aid items of information, for example the NOTAM (Notice To Air Men) messages which are notices broadcast by telecommunication and giving, with regard to the establishment, status or modification of a service, an aeronautical procedure or a danger to air navigation, items of information which it is essential to communicate on time to the personnel responsible for air operations. The crew must memorize these items of information in order to take account of them during their mission.
The crew is therefore working in an environment loaded with navigation information of different types (navigation instructions, navigation aid information) which is given to it on different media in a scattered manner. This does not facilitate the work of the crew which has to become aware of the different items of information simultaneously, identify the items of information useful for its mission, process them and sometimes even cross-reference these items of information in order to make good decisions in order to conduct its mission successfully. For example, the pilot is often called upon to make calculations mentally in order to check the compatibility of the items of information with the flight plan. The crew can notably be called upon to check if, on following its flight plan, it will not penetrate into a prohibited space which has been notified to it by a NOTAM. The processing of these items of information by the crew represents a risk factor because, on the one hand, it demands the attention of the crew and, on the other hand, it is approximate. It is moreover difficult for the crew to have a global vision of the actions which it has to carry out during its mission and to plan it work in order to distribute its workload in an optimum manner. This can result in forgetting tasks and can prejudice flight safety.